friends,
for the first time in all my flying, i missed my plane yesterday. drats. simple as setting alarm for 'time to be at airport' not for 'time to get up to get ready and goto airport'. and of course, it being sunday, the Delta airline office was closed, and you can't get china air on the phone. still, we packed up and took a taxi to the airport. i went to the china airlines counter and the ladie said there was a 1:30pm flight, no problem. okay good. went through all the dreary goodbyes at the security gate etc. when i got back to the counter and they started punching things in the terminal, things went wrong. seems that china airlines only has one "codeshare" flight per day. and since i have a paper ticket, i had to goto the delta office to change it. but they don't open until 9:00 am monday, and the flight for the day leaves at 8:25am. sweet. all of this took much discussion, terminal keying, calls to supervisors etc. fortunately Tok was still waiting at the passenger fence. we took taxi back to the hotel. when the taxi stopped, i woke from my nap and opened the door... and clipped a car that was zooming past. black-car stops, there is a lot of discussions in thai, broken mirror glass on the ground and i have little idea what's going on. we got the new room (wayyyyyyyyy in the back of the lodge) and when we came back out, the taxi and black-car are still there. black-car man calling insurance company. we ate lunch at the road stall. eventually some guys came out on a motorbike, took pictures and made out paper work and told me that i had to split the cost with the insurance company. 2000 baht (little over 52.00). i gave the taxi driver 200 baht, because it wasn't his fault and it had taken up much of his time and fares to deal with all this. he was quite surprized and grateful for that.
so this morning, monday, tok and i take the skytrain and walk to the delta office - up on the 27 floor of an office building and rebook the ticket. oh, another 75.00 USD to change the ticket. the original flight is booked now. so once again, my arrival in seattle is set back. now i return to Seattle on the 29th of may, china airlines, flight 22 arrives 7:10pm. my thai visa expires tomorrow, the 23rd, so i have a little problem there. i don't need to spend MORE money to make a visa run to cambodia, so i'm going to leave BKK tomorrow morning and fly to taiwan. i have a friend from the english course who lives there, and i will visit with them for 5 days, waiting for the flight to Seattle. that will be interesting. doug and his wife are starting an english school in Taipei, so i am looking forward to seeing how it all works. and to hang out in Taiwan for a bit. more foreign money to add to my collection of places to come back to. but, the cash is gone. i had to take back the money i gave Tok to live on to pay for scratched car, more hotel and food etc, i'm going to be eating rice and walking alot in Taiwan. the Dutch have a saying: "laugh and pay". i'm laughing my ass off.
Onward!
Nu
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i am in thailand at the moment. to be added or deleted from my travelogue, send request to this address. view previous posts at: http://thaikarl.blogspot.com/
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